SoundMonsters: Change Is Everything

A glance at the clock brings you back to reality. It’s 7 o’clock in the morning on a Sunday. You wanted to be home long ago but the Berlin summer night propelled you and your friends from one club to the next. And now here you are, in the middle of a slightly run down industrial site. Around you are a couple of buildings nearer to decay than to the busy activity that once must have been. Why are you here again? You remember. The sheep you met along the way handed you a strange piece of paper with directions that guided you straight here. The sheep? The sheep. From one of the buildings music can be heard, dance driven music. You walk over. And then enter. A heavy, old curtain divides the entrance hall from the dance floor. It throbs. The sheep stands in front of you and fixes you with a stare. It steps aside and you step inside.

Now you are in the middle of the strangely beautiful world of the SoundMonsters. Three of them, located in Berlin, who can be described as the inventors of the Electronic-Future-Pop Genre. It all started some years ago in one of those long Berlin nights in which you meet accidentally and talk about music and visions and then, after a couple of beers, someone says: “Let’s make music together”. When it happened a couple of weeks later, with the help of an old microphone and a not quite tame Laptop, it was a liberation for the band. The SoundMonsters were born and later their LoveHateSounds, a really rough, danceable, guitar driven Indie album with electronic elements. Right from the beginning there was a great affinity to the Berlin Techno Scene which was the first indication that the SoundMonsters were not “just another Indie band”. And so LoveHateSounds 2004 was published under the Berlin label Road RageRecords, which was better known for artists like Klaus Jankuhn or Westbam from the Elektro-Scene, who immediately made a Remix-EP from the first Single, Rock The LoveHate Sound, the SoundMonsters produced. Rock The LoveHate immediately stormed up the the DJ-Charts and became a guarantee for club nights filled with ecstasy and whirling arms. A few months later Lexy & Haito (Lexy & K.Paul) provided a second helping and remixed the second SoundMonsters Single, Blackout. To make the symbiosis complete, their stage debut took place in one of Berlin’s most prestigious clubs for electronic music, the Maria am Ostbahnhof.

SoundMonsters: Change Is Everything

After their huge success in the techno scene in Berlin, but at the same time moving between different genres, the Monsters turned to the question of their identity, who or what did they want to be and where the whole thing was supposed to go. Some bands break up as a result of such issues, others are inspired by this indefinable feeling and create a whole new world, which is hard to beat when it comes to authenticity and uncompromising passion. “Musical openness is important to me. And the SoundMonsters represent just that for me personally. To dare to do things I probably would keep my hands off normally,” Paul, the drummer and sound boffin, reflects.